Poorly worded and badly placed headlines

in #news2 years ago

I worked as an unpaid editor for a weekly college newspaper that had a circulation of around 30,000 units. This is not a big distribution but I went to college in a relatively small city. I had this job for a semester and was never paid a dime for my work. I suppose you could say that I got a bunch of experience but it was all for naught because when I looked for jobs in this field in the late 90's there were two things working against me: The print newspaper industry was collapsing and the few jobs that remain were all driven by nepotism.

There are still a few people that work in this field although most of them work digitally and there isn't any print version of what they are doing. This works out nicely for lazy or unqualified editors because they can do a digital edit without the embarrassment of thousands or tens of thousands of newspapers already being in the hands of the customers.


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While there isn't anything wrong with the wording of this article, image placement is just as important as the stories it is relating to. This is considered very poor work as far as editing is concerned because as an editor, your journalists often don't have any idea what the layout of the paper is going to be until it is already printed. At least this one ended up being funny and we cant' really say that for the next one.


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Imagine this BBQ fan's horror when he is all of a sudden affiliated with cooking dead cats? Anyone who bothered to read the actual article would quickly realize that this is not what is happening here but there are a lot of really stupid people out there in the world that probably decided to boycott his business in protest of him cooking cats, which is illegal and also not what he was doing. Hopefully he had a good sense of humor about it and framed this front page. I know I would have.


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Aside from a devote group of extremely partisan viewers, CNN is the laughing stock of the news world at the moment. Their fall from grace has been quite rapid since the start of this year and they are already talking about how they are going to completely revamp the network. This is an innocent mistake on their part, but one that they should have definitely caught. The two clickable stories are not related but they are hilarious if you think that they are.


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As the internet started taking over every aspect of our lives in the late 90's and early 2000's it was quite common for websites to be featured for additional information. Whoever decided to put this hyperlink in the article either was oblivious as to how the internet works or they didn't care... I suspect it is a combination of both. I seriously doubt that anyone actually typed that in.


So these are people that have jobs that I presume are paid. In the 6 months or so that I was an editor I never made a mistake like this and I would have been pretty severely reprimanded and likely removed from my position if I had done it more than once. This was a very competitive internship after all and there were plenty of people looking to take my place if I slipped up. At least we can laugh a little bit at their mistakes.

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just saw this one and it made me think of you so i had to share! ....eek. thanks for all the posts, they are usually very funny

https://mobile.twitter.com/Rubber0Cement/status/1471362043454189572

oh that's fantastic. I've never seen that one. Thanks for sharing :)